Robert Silverberg: Something Wild Is Loose

By four that afternoon Mookherji had finished most of his chores. He had seen every patient; he had brought his progress charts up to date; he had fed a prognosis digest to the master computer that was the starport hospital’s control center; he had found time for a gulped lunch. Ordinarily, now, he could take the next four hours off, going back to his spartan room in the residents’ building at the edge of the starport complex for a nap, or dropping in at the recreation center to have a couple rounds of floater-tennis, or looking in at the latest cube-show, or whatever. His next round of patient-visiting didn’t begin until eight in the evening. But he couldn’t relax: there was that business of the quarantined spacemen to worry about. Nakadai had been sending test outputs over since two o’clock, and now they were stacked deep in Mookherji’s data terminal. Nothing had carried an urgent flag, so Mookherji had simply let the reports pile up; but now he felt he ought to have a look. He tapped the keys of the terminal, requesting printouts, and Nakadai’s outputs began to slide from the slot.

Mookherji ruffled through the yellow sheets. Reflexes, synapse charge, degree of neural ionization, endocrine balances, visual response, respiratory and circulatory, cerebral molecular exchange, sensory percepts, EEG both enhanced and minimated…No, nothing unusual here. It was plain from the tests that the six men who had been to Norton’s Star were badly in need of a vacation—frayed nerves, blurred reflexes—but there was no indication of anything more serious than chronic loss of sleep. He couldn’t detect signs of brain lesions, infection, nerve damage, or other organic disabilities.

Why the nightmares, then?

He tapped out the phone number of Nakadai’s office. “Quarantine,” a crisp voice said almost at once, and moments later Nakadai’s lean, tawny face appeared on the screen. “Hello, Pete. I was just going to call you.”

Mookherji said, “I didn’t finish up until a little while ago. But I’ve been through the outputs you sent over. Lee, there’s nothing here.”

“As I thought.”

“What about the men? You were supposed to call me if any of them went into nightmares.”

“None of them have,” Nakadai said. “Falkirk and Rodriguez have been sleeping since eleven. Like lambs. Schmidt and Carroll were allowed to conk out at half past one. Webster and Schiavone hit the cots at three. All six are still snoring away, sleeping like they haven’t slept in years. I’ve got them loaded with equipment and everything’s reading perfectly normal. You want me to shunt the data to you?”

“Why bother? If they aren’t hallucinating, what’ll I learn?”

“Does that mean you plan to skip the mind-probes tonight?”

“I don’t know,” Mookherji said, shrugging. “I suspect there’s no point in it, but let’s leave that part open. I’ll be finishing my evening rounds about eleven, and if there’s some reason to get into the heads of those spacemen then, I will.” He frowned. “But look—didn’t they say that each one of them went into the nightmares on every single sleep-shift?”

“Right.”

“And here they are, sleeping outside the ship to for the first time since the nightmares started, and none of them having any trouble at all. And no sign of possible hallucinogenic brain lesions. You know something, Lee? I’m starting to come around to a very silly hypothesis that those men proposed this morning.”

“That the hallucinations were caused by some unseen alien being?” Nakadai asked.

“Something like that. Lee, what’s the status of the ship they came in on?”

“It’s been through all the routine purification checks, and now it’s sitting in an isolation vector until we have some idea of what’s on.”

“Would I be able to get aboard it?” Mookherji asked.

“I suppose so, yes, but—why—?”

“On the wild shot that something external caused those nightmares and that that something may still be aboard the ship. And perhaps a lowlevel telepath like myself will be able to detect its presence. Can you set up clearance fast?”

“Within ten minutes,” Nakadai said. “I’ll pick you up.”

Nakadai came by shortly in a rollerbuggy. As they headed toward the landing field, he handed Mookherji a crumpled spacesuit and told him to put it on.

“What for?”

“You may want to breathe inside the ship. Right now it’s full of vacuum—we decided it wasn’t safe to leave it under atmosphere. Also it’s still loaded with radiation from the decontamination process. Okay?”

Mookherji struggled into the suit.

They reached the ship: a standard interstellar null-gravity-drive job, looking small and lonely in its corner of the field. A robot cordon kept it under isolation, but, tipped off by the control center, the robots let the two doctors pass. Nakadai remained outside; Mookherji crawled into the safety pouch and, after the hatch had gone through its admission cycle, entered the ship. He moved cautiously from cabin to cabin, like a man walking in a forest that was said to have a jaguar in every tree. While looking about, he brought himself as quickly as possible up to full telepathic receptivity, and, wide open, awaited telepathic contact with anything that might be lurking in the ship.

—Go on. Do your worst.

Complete silence on all mental wavelengths. Mookherji prowled everywhere: the cargo hold, the crew cabins, the drive compartments. Everything empty, everything still. Surely he would have been able to detect the presence of a telepathic creature in here, no matter how alien; if it was capable of reaching the mind of a sleeping spaceman, it should be able to reach the mind of a waking telepath as well. After fifteen minutes he left the ship, satisfied.

“Nothing there,” he told Nakadai. “We’re still nowhere.”

The Vsiir was growing desperate. It had been roaming this building all day; judging by the quality of the solar radiation coming through the windows, night was beginning to fall now. And, though there were open minds on every level of the structure, the Vsiir had had no luck in making contact. At least there had been no more terminations. But it was the same story here as on the ship: whenever the Vsiir touched a human mind, the reaction was so negative as to make communication impossible. And yet the Vsiir went on and on and on, to mind after mind, unable to believe that this whole planet did not hold a single human to whom it could tell its story. It hoped it was not doing severe damage to these minds it was approaching; but it had its own fate to consider.

Perhaps this mind would be the one. The Vsiir started once more to tell its tale—

Half past nine at night. Dr. Peter Mookherji, bloodshot, tense, hauled himself through his neuropathological responsibilities. The ward was full: a schizoid collapse, a catatonic freeze, Satina in her coma, half a dozen routine hysterias, a couple of paralysis cases, an aphasic, and plenty more, enough to keep him going for sixteen hours a day and strain his telepathic powers, not to mention his conventional medical skills, to their limits. Some day the ordeal of residency would be over; some day he’d be quit of this hospital, and would set up private practice on some sweet tropical isle, and commute to Bombay on weekends to see his family, and spend his holidays on planets of distant stars, like any prosperous medical specialist…Some day. He tried to banish such lavish fantasies from his mind. If you’re going to look forward to anything, he told himself, look forward to midnight. To sleep. Beautiful, beautiful sleep. And in the morning it all begins again, Satina and the coma, the schizoid, the catatonic, the aphasic…

As he stepped into the hall, going from patient to patient, his annunciator said, “Dr. Mookherji, please report at once to Dr. Bailey’s office.”